I was brawling in RavnicaLocking in an X of ten for RepealI was brawling in RavnicaBut does reality peel the way I peel?

I don’t know if brawling in Ravnica is like “Walking in Memphis,” nor do I intend to find out. But going to the known quantity of Ravnica for visit three in October, which causes Brawl’s first rotation, gives us a chance to make decent predictions even before spoiler season.

Marc Cohn won Best New Artist at the Grammy Awards in 1991 off “Walking in Memphis,” but is largely considered a one-hit wonder now. Similarly, Brawl won Best New Format at the Srammy Awards in 2018, but will it be a one-hit wonder? I think the format’s great, but figuring out rotation now eases the shock of when it happens.

What Have the Stats Told Us?

According to EDHREC, there are 100 Brawl commanders with at least six decks (the other 42 have fewer than that, including some that have none). Those top 100 add up to around 4,400 decks. Here’s their metagame share broken down by number of colors in the deck:

Even with more mono-colored options among the top 100, it’s primarily a two-color format. The most prolific mono-colored Brawler is Ghalta, Primal Hunger by far, but it comes in around #13 overall (which, incidentally, was “Walking in Memphis”‘s top position on the Billboard Hot 100).

Compare that color spread to Commander, where the top 100 by EDHREC comprise over 140,000 decks, and you get a different story. Why that’s true is illuminating.

For Commander, three-color decks have the plurality among the top 100 commanders, while in Brawl, they’re only as frequent as mono-color decks. It boils down to selection, but in several ways:

Lands – The mana is more robust in Commander, obviously, and that allows greedy mana on spells in a way Brawl can punish.

Commanders – We’re now so used to the annual cycle of Commander decks and other multiplayer products that it’s easy to forget how rare multicolored legendary creatures are in Standard. Simic colors have had only nine legendary creatures in the history of Standard; four of them are in the current Standard, and there were none before Experiment Kraj and Momir Vig, Simic Visionary in 2005. Three-color legends are about as rare: before Chromium, the Mutable, Esper hadn’t had a legendary creature in Standard since Alara block ten years ago. That makes sense – they’re hard to make work in Limited unless the set’s explicitly about shards or wedges. But people want those legendary creatures, so where do they come from? Multiplayer sets:

Color breakdown of multiplayer-only commanders*

Colors Commanders0-1 15
2 39
3 40
4 5
5 4

* Commander 2016 partners are not included. Battlebond partners are included as six of the two-color entries.

There you have the biggest difference explaining why Brawl is a two-color format while Commander is more of a three-color format – Wizards of the Coast has been using its multiplayer products to push the format in that direction while letting Standard sets provide mono-colored and two-colored commanders.

To the extent that mono-colored decks have been viable in Brawl, they’ve had access to so many artifacts that “colorless” is effectively their second color. To get a sense of how that will matter, here’s a comparison of some of EDHREC’s top artifacts for either format by percentage of decks that include them:

Previous Ravnica blocks have cared loads about two-color cards, but not artifacts. After rotation, I expect mono-colored decks to find life even more difficult without cards like Walking Ballista, Skysovereign, and Heart of Kiran. The most popular three-color decks haven’t been big on artifacts outside utility players (most of which are from Ixalan block), since they have access to more in-color effects, but Muldrotha, the Gravetide will miss Walking Ballista as the artifact payoff.

They’ve got ten guilds on the tabletAnd dissension in the airAnd Gruul (the red-green) will be glad to see youWhen you’re tired of being thereBut you’re always there in Ravnica

Here’s a prognosis for each of the color pairs heading back to Ravnica, with Guilds of Ravnica in October and Ravnica Allegiance in January each having five guilds:

The only legend left after rotation is Rona, Disciple of Gix, and she hasn’t been popular, so no idea what will happen here. Losing The Scarab God is a big shift for Brawl and Standard, and I’ve lost to both Dimir Tezzerets in Brawl. Some Tezzeret synergies can move to Rona, but I think blue-black lovers will just go to the new legends.

All five Orzhov leaders have a fair number of decks, and only Kambal, Consul of Allocation rotates. A lot of spells for the archetype are leaving, too. But like with Huatli, even if Kambal‘s slow drain strategy won’t have Kambal in it, I suspect the guild’s leaders will play similarly.

Boros presumably isn’t as disadvantaged in Brawl as it’s reputed to be in Commander, but we’ll see how it goes when Depala, Pilot Exemplar (and most Dwarves and Vehicles) rotate and Tiana, Ship’s Caretaker loses several parts to take care of. Will this Ravnica finally give Boros multiplayer success?

Having played plenty of Brawl with older Standard formats, I’m excited to see how all this plays out. Artifact blocks can wear out their welcome in Constructed quickly due to the ubiquity of colorless cards, and Brawl has had some of that feeling. Removing that while reinforcing Brawl’s natural two-color focus should help make each deck more distinctive, and if you’ve read any other work from me you know I love distinctive decks. It should be a fun year for Brawl; here’s hoping it’s more than a one-hit wonder.

Brandon Isleib plays a lot of Commander and Brawl and loves finding the intersection of unusual and effective plays. He worked for Wizards of the Coast in 2014, he has put flavor text on a few cards, and he’s partly responsible for “create” being the word for cards making tokens. He is a legislation editor for the city of Seattle, he has written a baseball book, and he is proficient at making his bio sound more impressive than it is.